Getting Back On The Map

Can The Chicago International Film Festival Regain Its Focus-and Its Stature?

January 10, 1996|By Mark Caro, Tribune Staff Writer.

Michael Kutza is sick of the second-guessing, Monday morning quarterbacking and general nay-saying that have accompanied his 31-year reign over the Chicago International Film Festival.

The comparisons to the more popular and better-funded Toronto festival grew tiresome years ago.

The perceived lack of enthusiasm and support by the city has been an ongoing frustration.

The complaints that too many films are unknown seemed to contradict the spirit of discovery in which the festival was founded.

By many accounts, Kutza isn't one who appreciates criticism anyway. Yet after a couple of tumultuous months that began with a failed effort within the board to oust Kutza and culminated in the departure of the organization's board chairman and managing director, the festival's founder is seemingly ready to re-evaluate the course to which he has stubbornly stuck over three decades.

This re-evaluation, which will take the form of a committee report due at Cinema/Chicago's early February board meeting, comes with the event facing an identity crisis.

When Kutza presented the first Chicago International Film Festival in 1965, it was North America's only large-scale, competitive festival. (New York's festival was already up and running but does not feature jury prizes.) Now, Chicago's annual October event is just another spot on a map cluttered with numerous other festivals--some of which overshadow it (Toronto's, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah), and many others that tug at the spotlight.

"It is a good time for us to refocus what we're doing," Kutza says. "In 30 years this festival has originated most of the things that the other festivals are doing. . . .

"Now there's (a festival) on every corner. They're like popcorn. In Florida there must be 25 film festivals. It's hard to make yourself special and get your festival noticed when so many of us show the same films."

While the most successful festivals have carved out their own niches--such as Sundance's hold on American independent films--Chicago's consistently has pursued a cast-a-wide-net strategy that can give an impression of trying to be everything for everyone. Now the festival must answer some vexing questions if it is to thrive--or even just survive:

- Is it primarily a local, national or international event?

- If it's local, how can it do what it has failed to do thus far--generate excitement among the city's everyday moviegoers as well as film buffs?

- If it's national or international, how can it attract the films, filmmakers and out-of-town media coverage that are bypassing it now?

- Perhaps most pressing, who's going to pay for its continuing operation?

When Ellis Goodman became board chairman two years ago, he guaranteed more than $300,000 in loans to the festival to cover its ongoing debt.

Goodman let his chairmanship expire at the end of the year and resigned from the board after his efforts to diminish Kutza's role failed. He is on the re-evaluation committee and, like Kutza, is keeping mum about details. But he acknowledged that the festival's financial difficulties are on the agenda.

In December, the festival also lost managing director Betsy Morris, whom Goodman hired in June 1994 to bring her 19 years of development experience to the organization's fundraising efforts. Even some Kutza allies call Morris' resignation a blow to the festival's ongoing efforts to gain credibility among corporations and other possible patrons.

Citing too much "interference" from above, Morris says she left because "I really felt like I couldn't do the job I was hired to do anymore. . . . The festival did not have the reputation as a well-run business or a well-run arts organization, and it became more and more difficult to try and turn it into one."

She has a succinct answer for another key question: Can the festival significantly change if Kutza remains in charge? "No."

Early on, Kutza earned a reputation for "discovering" important filmmakers at the festival. He premiered Martin Scorsese's debut feature, "Who's That Knocking at My Door?", in 1967 and also gave the first U.S. exposure to directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

But like Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause, whose penchant for plucking talent from obscurity has yielded superstar Scottie Pippen and Croatian sharpshooter Toni Kukoc as well as disappointments such as Jeff Sanders and Kris Bruton, Kutza has turned up his share of non-starters. And like Krause, the coups have grown harder to come by.

The good, the bad, the ugly

"In the years in which I covered the festival, my biggest complaint was that I felt there was as much of a chance of a person seeing a bad film as a good film and in some years a far greater chance," says Tribune movie columnist Gene Siskel.